Are you saying that Apple doesn't inspire design? Or are you saying "Yes, they inspire great design, but here's this other completely unrelated gripe I have, so

Are you saying that Apple doesn't inspire design? Or are you saying "Yes, they inspire great design, but here's this other completely unrelated gripe I have, so I'm going to grind my axe every time Apple is mentioned with any kind of positive tone?" I'm not slamming you on this, if you could show a connection between the two things, that would be very interesting. Sticking to software and not to hardware, I might say that Microsoft and the PC manufacturers allow anybody to make anything, so there are nice PC-Windows things but they are drowned in a sea of dreck. But Apple retain a tight fist over software and filter out the crap. It might appear that Apple inspires great software, but that's only because the proportion of nice stuff to dreck is higher when someone's filtering the dreck out. In reality there might be 2x or even 10x as much nice stuff in total written for Windows, it's just drowned by 100x as much dreck. Now, I am not saying that, it's a strawman put up as an example of drawing a connection between their closed platform policies and great design by third parties. Perhaps you can draw a better connection? I actually sympathize with you... I have written several blog posts criticizing Apple's policies. I just don't see the connection here and need some help connecting the dots.